Cognitive Neuroscience of Creative Language: The Poetic and the Prosaic

Coulson, Seana; Davenport, Tristan

doi:10.1002/9781118432501.ch19

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…The effects in the later time window may not be N400, and may be reflecting the activity of a distinct, later occurring process. This interpretation is compatible with models assuming mapping as a domain-general process for both metaphorical and complex literal language (Coulson, 2001;Coulson & Davenport, 2012;Coulson & Van Petten, 2007).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 82%

ERP evidence for conceptual mappings and comparison processes during the comprehension of conventional and novel metaphors

Lai

Curran

2013

Brain and Language

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Cognitive linguists suggest that understanding metaphors requires activation of conceptual mappings between the involved concepts. We tested whether mappings are indeed in use during metaphor comprehension, and what mapping means as a cognitive process with Event-Related Potentials. Participants read literal, conventional metaphorical, novel metaphorical, and anomalous target sentences preceded by primes with related or unrelated mappings. Experiment 1 used sentence-primes to activate related mappings, and Experiment 2 used simile-primes to induce comparison thinking. In the unprimed conditions of both experiments, metaphors elicited N400s more negative than the literals. In Experiment 1, related sentence-primes reduced the metaphor-literal N400 difference in conventional, but not in novel metaphors. In Experiment 2, related simile-primes reduced the metaphor-literal N400 difference in novel, but not clearly in conventional metaphors. We suggest that mapping as a process occurs in metaphors, and the ways in which it can be facilitated by comparison differ between conventional and novel metaphors.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 82%

ERP evidence for conceptual mappings and comparison processes during the comprehension of conventional and novel metaphors

Lai

Curran

2013

Brain and Language

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“…Meta-analytic accounts of functional neuroanatomy of figurative language comprehension in healthy people has further confirmed that the comprehension of figurative stimuli at large elicits a bi-hemispheric fronto-temporal network, wherein stronger activation foci are left-lateralized ( Bohrn et al, 2012 ; Rapp et al, 2012 ). These results are in line with the hypothesis that the LH is involved in figurative meaning processing and that other factors, such as verbal stimuli novelty and complexity, may better explain the extent of the RH recruitment ( Coulson and Davenport, 2012 ). As for metaphors, it has been found that conventional metaphors elicit a LH fronto-temporal activation, while novel metaphors elicit a more bilaterally distributed fronto-temporal network, albeit with stronger left-lateralized activations ( Bohrn et al, 2012 ; Rapp et al, 2012 ).…”

Section: Figurative Language and Metaphor Comprehensionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Metaphor Comprehension in Schizophrenic Patients

2018

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People with schizophrenia often exhibit difficulties to comprehend figurative expressions, such as irony, proverbs, metaphors and idioms, with a general proneness to neglect the figurative meaning and to accept the more literal one. This inability is usually referred to as concretism and it constitutes a clinical manifestation of the broader language dysfunction called Formal Thought Disorder. The current review focuses on the neuropsychological and neuroanatomical underpinnings of schizophrenics’ misinterpretation of a subgroup of figurative expressions, i.e., metaphors. Metaphors are heterogeneous in nature, classifiable according to various criteria; for instance, metaphors can be conventional and familiar, or conversely, novel and unusual. These linguistic distinctions are substantial because the comprehension of the different types of metaphor entails partially different cognitive strategies and neural substrates. This review gathers studies that have directly investigated which neurocognitive deficits explain the inefficient comprehension of metaphor in schizophrenia. Several impairments have been put forward, such as general intelligence, executive functions and theory of mind deficits. Moreover, the neural correlates of metaphor comprehension in schizophrenia, like the left inferior/medial frontal gyrus and the temporal lobe, match those cortices affected by the neuropathology of schizophrenia. Even though the causal defective mechanism is still a matter of investigation, we provide an attempt to integrate existing findings.

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Cognitive Neuroscience of Creative Language: The Poetic and the Prosaic

Cited by 2 publications

References 68 publications

ERP evidence for conceptual mappings and comparison processes during the comprehension of conventional and novel metaphors

ERP evidence for conceptual mappings and comparison processes during the comprehension of conventional and novel metaphors

Metaphor Comprehension in Schizophrenic Patients

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